Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Computer Fail

Fucking commands... and fucking lack of colors other than green!

This morning at work, a virus was going around in the form of e-cards. If you opened a zip attachment, your computer would essentially become a brick. I received a few of these, but figured it was bad news since it was from "a friend" and had kittens in it. And while I love kittens, especially warring ones, I did not love these kittens, and deleted them immediately.

I was telling Brian about this, and how I am 99.9% sure several people in my company WILL open this virus. They will think this:

Me: There's no name attached to this, it sounds vague, and I have no friends. Deleted!Computer Virus: Blast!

Brian then agreed with me, also working in the field of customers and technology. He then said if you were dumb enough to open this card, you should be punished by not getting a computer for a day and having to fend for yourself. We then decided that maybe a better course of action would be making you use outdated Operating Systems. Or Linux.

Which brings me to the DOS.

As in MS DOS.

I've had several run-ins with this system. A few programs and departments in my company still use DOS, and a friend of mine who works in media lamented that he must also use DOS on a regular basis for programming reasons. But that's not my main story.

Back in the day, my paternal Grandfather (Pepere) told me as a little kid that he thought MS DOS was the future, and that "Windows was just a phase". This was about 1993, and he did not see the writing on the wall. So he told me to study and love The DOS, because someday we'll all be using it every day again. Needless to say, he was old at this time. Unfortunately, he passed away in 1998, and did not get to see... that he might have been a smidge wrong.

I told Brian this story, and he laughed because he could picture me at age 9 trying to tell this old guy that The DOS was not the wave of the future, that Windows was. I also laughed, because I know that I was somewhat precocious as a kid and probably did just that.

So somewhere right now, I hope my coworkers who were dumb enough to open these computer viruses must use The DOS, and that my grandfather is laughing at all of this.